Editor’s note: This story is part of an ongoing “Sowing Change” series about urban farming.
For centuries, and despite immense challenges, Black farmers have played a vital role in shaping U.S. agriculture. From George Washington Carver’s groundbreaking research in crop rotation and soil health to Fannie Lou Hamer’s advocacy for land ownership and food sovereignty to Booker T. Whatley’s pioneering work in sustainable small farming and direct-to-consumer sales, Black agricultural activists have left an enduring legacy. That history has been set upon a background of systemic barriers such as land dispossession, discriminatory lending practices and exclusion from federal assistance that dramatically reduced Black-owned farmland.
Today, a new generation of Black farmers is blending tradition with innovation to reshape the future of urban agriculture. These modern champions are not only cultivating land and tackling food insecurity but also growing knowledge and inspiring the communities in which they live.
According to the Census of Agriculture, conducted every five years, the 2022 ag survey showed 46,738 producers who identified as Black, accounting for 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million producers. The census showed that 70% of Black farmers owned the land they operated, 22% were part owners and 8% rented the land operated.
This entry of The Packer’s urban farming series explores the triumphs of four Black urban farmers — in Chicago, Atlanta, Mississippi Delta and Los Angeles — highlighting the new generations working to reclaim land, build food sovereignty and strengthen communities.
Pastor Eddie Anderson — CEO of Partnership for Growth LA, Los Angeles
“Our ancestors’ legacy lives through us as we try to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies.”
South Los Angeles is a food swamp — with more liquor and convenience stores than grocery stores, says Pastor Eddie Anderson. Freedom Farms, the flagship program of Partnership for Growth LA, was established to meet the food needs of this community.
“We have 8.5 liquor stores per square mile in South L.A. We have 18 retail grocery stores, and 10 of them do not sell any fresh fruits or vegetables,” he said. “When we realized this and the limited access to fresh produce, we assessed the situation and realized we were not helping our community.”
Los Angeles is the second-most populated city in the U.S., situated in the third largest state, Anderson says, yet African Americans live 12 fewer years on average in Los Angeles County than anywhere else.
“And that is partly because of what we eat,” he said. “We have higher rates of diabetes, of stress, and the foods we eat do not help that.
“We found that 1 in 4 kids in our neighborhood were food insecure, which corresponds to 1 in 4 families in Los Angeles are poor,” he added. “So, we decided that to meet that need. We’ve got to start with food and education, and food farming was our solution.”
Anderson said organizers looked to the past for inspiration and named the program Freedom Farms after Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, founded in 1969.
“Looking at the past, we knew the Black Panther Party gave away free food. We knew that community development corporations have tried this in L.A. previously,” he said. “There was a pastor in the 1930s named Clayton Russell who had five Victory Markets, cooperative grocery stores in Los Angeles. But they were redlined by the city; the stores all closed, and that took away healthy food.”
Anderson decided the solution would be to create a farm-to-fridge movement in South and West Los Angeles. Through Freedom Farms, they aim to democratize and scale urban farming and enhance food accessibility by investing in local urban farms.
Anderson, a pastor, co-founded the organization with Rabbi Joel Simonds. Their goal is to create 37 urban farms over a five-year period that started in 2021. They’ve created 15 so far.
The process involves starting urban farms in the community but also visiting existing community gardens and figuring out what they might need.
One example is a garden at an elementary school on the west side, where Anderson says the food grown feeds the families of children attending the school. They took larger community gardens and turned them into urban farms, then brought in an educational program to train the children to farm.
“During the summer they grew a couple hundred pounds of food, and we took that food, along with food grown by another grantee on a rooftop, and we fed an entire neighborhood farm complex,” Anderson said.
The goal is to make food accessible and healthy; with land prices in Los Angeles at a premium — a two-bedroom home can cost in the millions — it’s important to find creative ways to grow food, Anderson says.
“Finding land is hard, so we’re doing hydroponic farming, we’re doing raised beds, we’re growing on rooftops … and we’re trying to maximize the land available like abandoned and vacant alleys,” he said.
As the projects grew, the next challenge became where to sell the food and how to educate residents about cooking and eating fresh produce.
“We realized we needed a touch point where people can go and learn, so we’re building with a local community developer in the heart of Black Los Angeles, The Grocery Store,” Anderson said. “We’re aggregating farms and the produce stand there, but we’re also providing temporary programming where we’ll have fancy L.A. chefs teach people how to eat the food, how to prepare the food, what is the life cycle of the food … so it connects folks back to the land and how we can move forward.”
Anderson sees the solution as finding innovative ways to farm in urban cities and ways to bring fresh food to the community through partnering with local markets.
One group working to bring this food to the city is the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. Anderson says the council takes liquor stores in the food swamp and turns them into healthy neighborhood markets. It seeks local urban farmers to supply the markets so that “when someone goes to the convenience store to buy liquor, they can also get fruits and vegetables,” he said. “I see that legacy as cooperative economics. I see that legacy as understanding we can eat healthy and extend our lives. I see that legacy living through us and finding ways to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies, and that’s a direct correlation to the stories and foodways of our ancestors.
“Our ancestors’ legacy lives through us as we try to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies,” Anderson added.
Erika Allen — CEO of Urban Growers Collective, Chicago
“We just want the next generation, really all generations, to get re-engaged in agriculture.”
Urban Growers Collective is a Black and women-led 501(c)3 nonprofit organization based in Chicago that cultivates nourishing environments that support health, economic development, healing and creativity through urban agriculture. Working closely with community partners, its approach is to demonstrate the development of community-based food systems and to support communities in developing systems of their own where food is grown, prepared and distributed within the community itself.
Urban Growers Collective operates eight urban farms on 11 acres, providing fresh produce through farmers markets, community supported agriculture subscriptions and a mobile market. The collective also supports food security initiatives and education.
Erika Allen grew up in agriculture. Her father, Will Allen, is a retired professional basketball player also known for his innovations in urban farming. Erika Allen says she grew up on a small farm in Wisconsin where the family grew cabbage, greens, tomatoes, green beans and corn, and the experience shaped her childhood.
“I learned early about hard work and how to grow different kinds of vegetables,” she said. “I went to the farmer’s markets, so I did a lot of direct marketing and helped with wholesale orders. It was kind of an old-school farm family upbringing.”
Allen attended art school in Chicago and, through her work as an artist, dealt with social issues and cultural reclamation; she eventually decided to return to school to get a master’s degree in art psychotherapy.
“I wanted to do intervention work with at-risk teens who are at high risk for incarceration using therapeutic intervention, because art is such a therapeutic modality,” she said.
In the wake of 9/11, Allen was working at a small social service agency, delivering Federal Emergency Management Agency services to families for utilities and rent assistance. She was also running a food pantry.
“I started thinking it would be great to grow food and engage families while complementing the food pantry resources,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’m in Chicago with millions of people, working with at-risk families, and knew they didn’t have a family farm to go to or the expertise to grow food. I realized that in my age group, very few people like me know how to grow food.
This need led Allen to pivot her intervention work. Instead of art, she focused on food production and using space to grow lots of food.
She had been building systems and experimenting with that in Milwaukee, so in 2002 she opened an office in Chicago for her new pursuit, translating the techniques she learned for creating soil into the urban landscape to meet the same basic human needs, making sure there’s access. Since then, Allen says she’s been activating farms wherever there have been spaces.
“Many are on public land because public land is for everyone,” she said. The work is about growing food, engaging youth and making sure there’s access, equitable access in all communities for fresh, safe, healthy, culturally appropriate food. So, those eight farms are community rooted, and all have youth programs to employ youth workers and also farm staff. The farm staff are often adults who start off as part of the youth core, maybe as interns that matriculate to become growers — first growers in training, then full-time growers.”
Between the farms and the outreach options, Allen says they provide education and are a community resource where people can have food security but also introduce young people to agriculture.
“Many go onto agriculture or food-related careers and education,” she said. “We just want the next generation, really all generations, to get re-engaged in agriculture.
“There’s also an opportunity for young people with limited options becoming able to earn revenue through their efforts,” she added. “So, it was another way to intervene. I wanted to add a bridge for a different kind of life.”
One life she changed was that of Malcom Evans, who started working on urban gardens at age 9 and, now in his 30s, is a farm director.
He began his farming career when Growing Power installed the Chicago Lights Urban Farm and Community Garden in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood; then while still in high school, Evans began the composting program at Growing Power Chicago, collecting compost from restaurants throughout the city after school and on weekends. In 2017, Evans began as production manager for Urban Growers Collective and became director of farming in 2022.
The food grown is sold at farmers markets and through community supported agriculture subscription programs. Last year, 150 CSA members received weekly shares.
There’s also a mobile farmers market where they converted an airport shuttle bus that was retrofitted as a grocery aisle on wheels, Allen says.
“It’s refrigerated, so we have some butter and eggs, all your fruits and vegetables, anything you would buy in the grocery store produce aisle,” she said. “During the pandemic, we did a lot of emergency food distribution. Now we’re really focusing on fresh, local produce that’s seasonal but still offering bananas and oranges and grapes, some of the items our community members can’t easily access.”
The organization already grows a lot of food, Allen says, and its current goal is to expand its reach.
“We’re activating a farm in Glenwood, right outside of Chicago, a 30-acre farm where we’re able to grow all of our nursery plants for all of our projects in the community,” she said. “So, we can offer so many creative things and also kind of reactivate people’s connection to farming.”
Patrick S. Muhammad — Your Faith Farms, Atlanta
“In studying generational wealth, I realized wealthy families usually have a farm somewhere in the portfolio.”
Patrick Muhammad says his father once asked him, “Son, what are you going to leave your children?”
When thinking about legacy, and what he would pass down to his family, Muhammad says his father asked him to study generational wealth.
“In studying generational wealth, I realized wealthy families usually have a farm somewhere in the portfolio,” he said. “And once I realized this, I began asking, ‘How can we do this?’”
Muhammad, his wife Ishtar and their three children decided to take that first step, which included finding a mentor named Wayne Swanson. With guidance from Swanson, Muhammad says they bought eight cows.
“And with those eight cows, we got our feet wet. About seven months later, we purchased the 31-acre farm in a leap of faith — and named it Your Faith Farms,” he said.
Fast forward 10 years, the first-generation farmer has transformed Your Faith Farms into a thriving homesteading oasis with 40 grass-fed cows, hundreds of sheep and various crops, while operating two farmers markets and a 50-share community supported agriculture program. In addition, he has helped over 30 families purchase and build out their own farms.
Add to that, Muhammad is principal of Chattahoochee Hills Charter School, an agriculture school where he inspires young students with hands-on lessons that extend beyond the classroom. It gives away 9,000 pounds of food every two weeks, illustrating the need in the community as well as the breadth of the school’s impact.
“It started with giving away food from a food bank at our school. I thought it would be a nice community exercise, but we went from needing 2,500 pounds of food every two weeks to 5,000 pounds,” Muhammad said. “Now we give away 9,000 pounds of food every two weeks. And when you see families needing this food — not just getting it because it’s there — you know the realities of the food injustices that are happening in the community.”
Muhammad says his mission is to inspire others to enjoy the slow pace of life and the joy of farming.
His journey has resonated widely; several of his educational videos have gone viral, reaching millions of views and sparking enthusiasm for sustainable farming. His work has received an Emmy nomination and earned widespread attention, with educational videos and features on Netflix’s “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” Fox’s “Home Free” and in a John Deere campaign.
Muhammad says his work at the school is to make sure children understand where and how food gets to their table.
“So, I say we’re an anti-drive-thru school,” he said. “We’re trying to encourage our children to make sure parents don’t go through the drive-thru but instead go to the grocery store, get out of the car, shop the perimeters of the grocery store, purchase those items, come home, take them out of the car, take them into the kitchen and then prepare the food and sit down and eat. That’s not fast food. That’s slow food. So we’re working to make sure children understand that to get a quality product takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Students learn that same lesson through growing food. Every child, Muhammad says, plants a seed twice a year on the campus.
“They’ll plant that seed. They’re going to nourish that seed until it gets up to maybe 2 [or] 3 inches, then they’re going to transplant it to our working farm,” he said. “Once transplanted, they’ll be responsible for maintaining it all the way to harvest. And once they harvest it, then we have an opportunity for them to either consume it on campus or take it home to their families.”
How does Muhammad and his family have the time and energy to work their farm, educate at the school as well as help others in the community start their own farms?
“We have a saying in my family: We want for our brother or sister what we want for ourselves,” he said. And the family puts this mission into practice.
As far as the legacy his father instilled in his mind, Muhammad says, “In creating a legacy, we believe that one man, one woman, one family, can change the world, one seed at a time.”
Pastor Bennie Brown — Rootswell and But God Ministries, Mississippi Delta
“The goal is to retain and build a new generation of farmers, addressing the challenges of a food desert and reconnecting the community with the farming legacy.”
Bennie Brown, a local farmer, pastor and economic development director, is leading an effort to establish a farm incubator on over 600 acres at Swan Lake Association Farms, aimed at training the next generation of farmers in the Mississippi Delta.
While the Delta is home to adverse economic and health conditions, the region has strong agricultural traditions and a rich and powerful cultural history, and it is primed for a local food system that supports health, nutrition security and cultural connectivity, Brown says.
“I was born on a farm, on a plantation. Later, my father began to lease land, and the family moved to another farm and we began to farm 50 acres of land,” he said. The land is part of the Swan Lake Association, where Black farmers could rent land instead of working as sharecroppers.
It helped having a large family, Brown says, and they were able to eventually purchase a tractor and other farming equipment.
“It took my father sharecropping for 57 years before he got into a position to rent the land,” he said. “Then in 1962, we moved to Swan Lake.”
Brown says there were probably 25 families living in similar situations at that time; they were first-generation farmers who began to build wealth because they could now grow their farms versus being sharecroppers.
The Swan Lake Association formed in 1870 through a partnership with Black-led churches in the Jonestown, Miss., area, eventually accumulating over 600 acres during the second great migration of the 1940s and 1950s.
Brown’s experience with Swan Lake led him to develop a farm incubator on the land to ensure future generations of Black farmers can learn and earn a living as his father did.
The program was critical to his family’s success, Brown says, providing everything they needed — a home, equipment, seeds — until they could afford their own equipment to run the farm.
“We made enough money that first year to reinvest back into the farming business,” he said. “We kept an area for growing our personal produce and an area for our own meat and hogs.”
It was a way for farmers to lease the land and have the tools to get started.
Now, as a farm incubator, Brown says he wants to bring back the same concept. The area has lost the generations of farmers who were coming off the plantations, he says, and as the years passed, children who were not interested in farming left home.
“So, because interest waned in farming, and the ones who had grown up with farming lost interest as time passed, the land was now being leased out to white farmers,” Brown said. “Our goal is to bring back part of it under the auspices of the Blacker farmer, and that means retraining a generation of farmers. To train them, we need something like an incubator, which will be 10 acres.”
The idea is to have 10 1-acre plots where farmers can farm one or two specialty crops.
“The goal is to retain and build a new generation of farmers, addressing the challenges of a food desert and reconnecting the community with the farming legacy,” Brown said.
The program will help these farmers get started. They’ll learn about their product, learn about irrigation practices, learn about pest control and take classes on food safety, he says.
“We can make sure that they have a market for their product larger than a farmer ‘s market,” Brown said. “They can scale up in a couple of years. They can be able to make a living.
“We’re living in a food desert here, but it doesn’t have to be,” he added. “The challenge we have is to train a new generation of farmers.”
Your next read: Sowing change — Urban farming and the law of the land
